To explain, the first Sunday of the year at our church is the community's opportunity to share Desolations and Consolations. This morning, this was explained variously as "What you are most and least thankful for", "What has been most life-giving and what has been most life-sucking", "What you have needed that you received, what you are still waiting for..."
The beauty of this service is of course, a community agreeing that God is Loving and Good through all manner of circumstance. Remembering together that many have been given much, and grieving together with those who have lost much is the heart of community, is what Being The Church is best at I think.
But here is the crap for me: The process affirms a world view wherein all good things are God-given and all bad things are just opportunities for God to substitute in a Good Thing that we can thank Him for - it turns the Creator of All into a candy dispenser that you sometimes have to smack around to get what you want delivered.
Friends were over a few weeks ago, and showed us a clip of Jerry Seinfeld doing stand-up on David Letterman. It's a long clip and for our purposes today, the relevant parts start around a minute twenty and then pick up again around the five minute mark. He says this: "The greatest lesson you can learn in life is that sucks and great are pretty close.... [Actually] sucks and great are the exact same thing."
And this is why this morning's exercise ends up being crap theology: we see through a glass darkly and we can not know what is Great and what Sucks from God's point of view. All we've got is how we feel about it with our limited understanding. When we start giving God credit for what at this moment feels Great, we end up in a dilemma about what to do with the things that Sucks. It's how we end up with poems like "Footprints" (my favourite response to which is found here in The Onion). And it's futile because I think Jerry's probably right - sucks and great are the exact same thing.
Probably I am just judgy and a bad congregant for being irked by this. It seems a bit harsh to be down on people standing up to acknowledge their gratitude for Jesus' faithfulness through their baby's near-death, their unsafe living situations or their on-going loneliness since their wife's death. I want to hear people tell of their experience of God Coming Near, and was heartened to know that indeed God has been With Us so faithfully through the year that has past.
I guess I'm objecting to what I think we used to call a false dichotomy in a class I took one time. Or maybe what I mean is that I don't think God is either Great, or just Sucks. I think God just Is and how we feel about our world at any given moment probably isn't a supergood measure of how well God is doing.
Ugh. This isn't coming together. I think this may be a Blog Fail. Sometimes I just want to be Anglican.
7 comments:
This post sucks...but was great to read.
See how close they are together??!!??
And when I say 'sucks' I mean that in our continual efforts to understand and articulate faith, we can make it more unattainable...thus prompting these sorts of ranting posts.
Your main sentence..."The process affirms a world view wherein all good things are God-given and all bad things are just opportunities for God to substitute in a Good Thing that we can thank Him for - it turns the Creator of All into a candy dispenser that you sometimes have to smack around to get what you want delivered."
Well, the good things ARE God-given, because He's the creator and we give credit to the source. Otherwise, who is a person grateful or thankful TO?
The bad things are NOT an "opportunity for God to substitute the good thing in" because usually or sometimes or whatever, He doesn't. He doesn't just substitute the bad thing with a good thing. Sometimes we live it, live through it, endure it, change it, dwell in it, go deeper, flounder, drown, bolt, stand, sink.
And there is no smacking of the candy machine to get what you want because the candy machine cannot be smacked. We have no power. No will over the eternal things, no possible way of changing the course of the pink bubblegum coming down the pipe or the black bubblegum.
@Mamabear, it is so Great that you see how much it Sucks.
@JennOh, Yes, Exactly! Which is why it is so confusing to leave yesterday feeling like the opposite of that was communicated somehow. I know you know this, and I know most of the people I know know this, and yet... and yet.
And to be clear, I think all of this Life is God-given and our all our thanks and praise are due him. All the time. So we praise all the time, because God is always Good, All The Time. Even if Life Sucks. We believe that both those things can be true at the same time, right? And if we do, then ... well, then yesterday was hard for me.
Maybe the issue, of what feeling/ethos seemed communicated yesterday is that the people who are knee deep in desolation didn't speak. The people who haven't come through something, who are in the lowness.. there are many there with this and they didn't speak. So sad and disappointed, I would have loved to cry along with these people as they processed outloud - but this is not the way for all.
Jenn! You did it! Thank you for continuing the dialogue because you unlocked the mystery for me.
Somehow things took a turn (from my observance) where it seemed like everyone who had desolation to share had to also find a consolation to add... *that* dynamic snuck in somehow and that was what troubled. Because that's not how it started and I knew it couldn't be the intention of anyone who had led the service, and yet... it kind of makes me believe in spiritual warfare actually. At least, I want to blame Evil for it, for whispering in our ears that it isn't okay to only find desolation in our hearts.
Oh, yay!! Thank you, thank you Jenn.
Thanks to you. There is no doubt that these perceptions of good and evil are worthy of a lot of thought.
Since I have started to hold in my hand the Christian version of ying/yang - that there is a tension of good and evil in all things, I find that I can function through life quite well.
Think of how Christianity in North America has evolved, first it was all black and white, then there was no black and white and only grey and now, I think, there is always black AND white. So to speak. Or Great and Sucks.
The important question for Rob and I, out of your blog and our subsequent conversation, is, supposing we were that family who almost lost their baby. If the baby had died at birth, then what would the consolation and desolation be? What would the faith be like?
Thanks be to God for comments because it was key for me to read the piece talking about how desolation could not stand alone...that folks needed to "add in" the consolation part.
I agree that the folks leading worship probably did not mean for that dynamic to happen. In fact maybe even share your feelings around it, but it is a learning curve for people just to hold out their hands with their offerings without needing to justify it somehow.
Post a Comment